Hotel of the Week: Couples Tower Isle, Jamaica

To be honest, my first impression of Jamaica wasn’t great. We landed at Montego Bay in torrential rain (it was September) and my first night in Ocho Rios was one of the worst I’ve ever spent in a hotel room.

The room’s cranky old air-con made a racket but I couldn’t turn it off, vehicles were coming and going from the parking lot below all through the night and there was a cargo ship unloading nearby. I think I got about two hours’ sleep, on and off.

So I was relieved the next day to check out of that hotel and move a few miles up the road to Couples Tower Isle Resort in St Mary.  Walking into the calm, peaceful lobby felt like stepping into a corner of heaven.

My recently refurbished deluxe garden room had a lovely fresh colonial feel. There was a king size bed, a walk-in closet, en-suite shower room with a rainmaker overhead shower, which I loved, and nice touches like an iPod docking station, digital flat screen TV and a hairdryer.

Best of all, the air-con didn’t clatter, my spacious balcony overlooked the lush gardens (rather than the car park) and my room was blissfully quiet. I didn’t even hear the almighty thunderstorm that night.

Like many hotels in Jamaica, Couples Tower Isle is all-inclusive. Breakfast is in the open-air Patio restaurant, which has glorious views of the sea. Can there be anything more relaxing than watching waves crashing on the beach while sipping your morning cuppa?

The breakfast buffet was enormous, full of the usual breakfast-y things plus local specialities such as fired ackee, the local Jamaican fruit, which was surprisingly delicious.

For lunch, you can choose to eat at the Patio, at the Pool Grill, which also serves dinner on the terrace, or the Veggie Bar. All three also serve dinner. Other options for dinner include The Verandah, Bayside (Asian) or the 1950s inspired glamorous Eight Rivers.

I chose to eat dinner at The Verandah, because it was one of the restaurants where reservations weren’t required. The service, as throughout the rest of the hotel, was excellent. The Jamaicans have perfected the art of service with a smile without making guests feel uncomfortable; waiters, cleaners, taxi drivers and tour guides alike talk to you like old friends, but they do their job efficiently.

However, despite the best efforts of my waiter, I wasn’t entirely comfortable in The Verandah because eating alone in a couples-only hotel is always going to be awkward.

I found it hard to ignore the sideways glances of the twentysomething American couple on their honeymoon sitting to my left, the uncomfortable smiles cast my way from the loved-up middle-aged man and his wife to my right and the sympathetic glances from the elderly pair who were still walking hand in hand, although they must have been well into their eighties. This is the sort of place you only come with your partner, and only if you are still very much in love.

When I saw the same elderly couple the following morning at breakfast they cast me a raised-eyebrows look that clearly said, "What, you still haven’t made it up with your husband?"  I escaped for a wander along the stretch of warm sandy beach directly below the restaurant, but it felt like a walk of shame as I past six, seven, eight couples holding hands as they lay in the sun.

All the sun loungers were lined up in pairs but I yanked one bed away from its partner, threw my things down and defiantly strolled into the sea, alone. It was like wading into a lukewarm bath.

Couples Tower Isle has three freshwater swimming pools, lots of watersports including scuba diving, there glass-bottomed boat tours too, guest have unlimited golf and there is a wide choice of fitness classes in an air-conditioned gym. There’s also a spa, but treatments cost extra.

I was intrigued to see a little boat ferrying passengers backwards and forwards to a small island out in the sea a little more than a stone’s throw from the beach. "What’s over there?" I asked the receptionist. "Ah pretty lady, that’s our nudist beach, you probably don’t want to go." Err, no, sunbathing alone amongst fully-clothed couples was already challenging enough.

My only niggle about Couples Tower Isle is the distance from Ocho Rios, to where it costs £12 to £15 in a cab, although the hotel does offer a shuttle service to the downtown area.

It would be easy not to shift from the hotel, simply to lie on the beach or by one of the pools or indulge in the vast array of watersports, but it would be a shame not to book one of the many excursions available and see at least something of Jamaica.

At breakfast one morning, I overheard a young American woman chatting to a guy who was on his honeymoon. "We came here for our own honeymoon and we’ve been coming back every year since," she told him. "There are probably some equally nice places in the world, but when you’ve already found paradise, why risk going anywhere else?" I think she had a point.

Linsey McNeill flew to Montego Bay with Virgin Atlantic which offers three flights a week from London Gatwick. In addition to Upper Class and economy, it offers a Premium service, which has recently been upgraded on all aircraft and now includes on-demand video entertainment. One-way upgrades are available at the airport from £185, subject to availability.